Consciousness has
produced this play.
Consciousness has written the script.
Consciousness is playing all the characters.
And Consciousness is witnessing the play.
It's a one man show.

- Ramesh S. Balsekar

by XAN on MillionPaths

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Zen Oleary
SufiMystic

Chopin Summer

The summer of endless Chopin
is the summer I spent with
my father as he lay dying,
he played piano, Chopin mostly,
though he couldn't any longer so
we played his collection of CD's,
they filtered the air we breathed,
became the soundtrack of our days,

we lived those summer days mindfully,
savored everything, the taste of a peach,
the laughter of children streaming
in the window, the bark of a dog,
rain drumming on the porch's tin roof,

we shared memories, snippets of our
childhoods, of family members
long gone, of my mother, also gone,
our talk became music, melodies
that erased old misunderstandings,
and wrote new poems, new stories to
sew together the diminishing now,

we held every moment in our hands
as gently as we would have a butterfly
or a baby bird knowing that this
moment was gifted to us, that their
numbers were rapidly diminishing,
I watched him fade like a leaf
slowly turning brown,
I was with him when he died.

I realize now how light and
wondrous those days were,
how thick with awareness,
with life, with caring, as if
sculpted in fragrant rosewood,
I have only to listen to Chopin
to replay the summer soundtrack
of those gifted last lived days,

to hear my father's voice urging
me to take nothing for granted,
or carelessly step on garden paths
my mind full of other things and miss
the lavendar flowers scenting the air,
I want this aching mindfulness to
bloom in me and fill my soul.

~ Zen Oleary
April 10,2003

* * * * *

EMAN8TIONS

Contradiction and confusion is almost
always a semantic thing.

We use words ambiguously and so when we use a word two ways,
thinking we are
saying the same thing, it creates confusion.

Or we substitute a word that really means the same thing,
thinking we have
made a distinction. We may say that we don't hate someone, we
just dislike
them. We are in the same general area of meaning but we may think
it's
alright to dislike someone as long as we don't hate them. Or we
may hide it
even further by saying that we prefer not to be in their company
or that we
just don't have time for them. But the damage is spiritually done
by the
fundamental fact of negative energy towards them. The rest is
simply a
semantic progression within the same general meaning.

So we try to find words that make things sound good rather than
actually
doing the thing that would be truly healing. For instance,
collateral damage
actually means killing innocent people, but sounds much better.

Spiritually we can go beyond words into a universe that is more
direct, more
beautiful, more loving than we could ever describe.

In a sense, words don't have meaning. They point at things,
ideas,
experiences, refer to various realities. We have gotten into such
a verbal
habit that our reality often becomes the words themselves, rather
than the
reality they are pointing to. So we often change our words, not
our reality.

I try to go beyond the words. They will catch up to
consciousness.

But a verbal jungle can obscure our awareness of reality. That is
how we are
manipulated, distracted, and misled.

Today I went to my dentist. She doing a lot of work for me
in trade
for artwork. And there is a problem. She lost a
daughter two years
ago, a child, and she is not recovering from it. There is a
brittle
barrier between her and any event that may be a bridge to her
memories of her lost child. I, of course, must honor her
reticence.
The work I was to have traded her was to be a portrait of the
little
girl and also a portrait of her living daughter.

She has already done a tremendous amount of good for me as I was
ill
from abcesses and neglect. As a dentist she feels she hurts
her
patients too much. When I filled a prescription, the
pharmacist saw
it and joked that she always apologizes to her patients for
hurting
them, which was true in my case, profusely so.

It has been more than six months and I have not started on any
work
for her. She cannot face it nor can her husband, a school
teacher.

I have been dwelling on a way to be a friend to her.

I few years ago I read 'The Creative Mind' by Henri Bergson the
Nobel
laureate. It is about metaphysics. He also who wrote
on time and
duration.

"Metaphysics, most generally, the philosophical
investigation of the
nature, constitution, and structure of reality. It is
broader in
scope than science, e.g., physics...." Panayot
Butchvarov, Univ of
Iowa for the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.

In order to be called an entity or 'real', philosophy of
metaphysics
gives a list of criteria. An entity must be either an
individual
thing, or a property, or a relation, or an event, or a state of
affairs, or a set. These categories are not complete but
that is the
idea. All of these except the first has to do with people
on the
scene or it would not exist.

I came away from Bergson with the idea that Physics describes
phenomena without people and metaphysics describes phenomena with
people on the scene.

Beauty is a category of experience. Everything is beautiful
but
sometimes we block that beauty. The more we want to hurt
ourselves
the more we block the beauty.

Beauty is real but dependent on people and art must deal
with beauty
and its blockage.

If the mind's fear of pain blocks the perception of the pain then
the
heart never has the chance to absorb it, and the mechanisms of
life
in the metaphysical sense, are eventually damaged.

The heart is as big as the ocean. The fear of pain is in
the head.

I left Dr. Ann with two paintings until she overcomes her fear
that
she will be consumed by pain and I can paint her lost
treasure.

People are so lovely.

Love,
Bobby G.

* * * * *

GILL
EARDLEY Allspirit

In our souls everything
moves guided by a mysterious hand.
We know nothing of our own souls
that are ununderstandable and say nothing.

The deepest words
of the wise man teach us
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows
or the sound of the water when it is flowing.

~Antonio Machado

Quoted in 'The Enlightened Heart'
Edited by Stephen Mitchell

* * *
* *

VIORICA
WEISSMAN MillionPaths

Meditation is to find out whether the
brain, with all its activities, all its experiences, can be
absolutely quiet. Not forced, because the moment you force, there
is duality. The entity that says, 'I would like to have
marvellous experiences, therefore I must force my brain to be
quiet' will never do it. But if you begin to inquire, observe,
listen to all movements of thought, its conditioning, its
pursuits, its fears, its pleasures, watch how the brain operates,
then you will see that the brain becomes extraordinarily quiet;
that quietness is not sleep but it is tremendously active and
therefore quiet. A big dynamo that is working perfectly hardly
makes a sound; it is only when there is friction that there is
noise. J.
Krishnamurti -

* * * * *

DAILY DHARMA

"Awareness is the original source of
all that is. It
is the uncaused, unchanging silence without beginning
or end. Consciousness arises in awareness and is the
all and everything of creation. There can be no
Consciousness except in awareness which is beyond
being and not being. Unconditional love originates in
awareness and is the ground of all that is. You are
that awareness. Whatever else you may believe yourself
to be ... the body, the mind, the separate "me"
involved in its apparent dramas and purposes, all of
this is only an invitation to discover that you are
the awareness through which all life emanates."
~Tony Parsons

From the Book. "As It Is: The Open Secret to Living an
Awakened Life," published by Inner Directions
Foundation.

* * * * *

SHAWN
NondualParent

This is madison, my second child, the
first to be born in hawaii.

The boss, she's a force to be wreckoned with...what does that
mean? Don't
butt heads, she's smart and always wins.

She named her first doll, Kaliyuga at one yr old. She never
heard me say
that....it came out of the void.

A bit of a control freak, I'm sure someday she'll make a good
Walmart
manager. ;-)

)))))))))Shawn

"sweet Maddi" photo

* * * * *

SHADOWFAUX
NDS

There is no sure way out of here save
death. We meditate. We
reflect upon our tenuous glimpses of "nothingness" and
"timelessness"
and "selflessness". We are touched by the
writings of others who
have done the same. We are awed by the vastness of what
lies beyond
us. We laugh at the absurdity of where we are. We cry
with the pain
of what we feel. And through it all we remain.
Here. Here in this
life. Here on this planet. Here within our bodies,
our selves. The
glimpses of what lies beyond offer us - what - comfort, freedom,
peace... "enlightenment"? We are drawn to it,
this "great beyond".
We feel the unceasing pulse of it, just beyond our grasp.
We long
for more (or perhaps "less"?). We crave deeper
meaning. Our
glimpses of vastness inspire and enlighten us. And still we
remain.
Here. What then? Are we here to find something
unique, something
that can only be found by being here, rather than anywhere else -
or
nowhere at all? Is the greatest irony of life that we spend
more
time seeking what lies beyond it than what lies within
it?

* * * * *

GLORIA LEE
HarshaSatsangh

ALL THE BREATHS

All the breaths all the
people
who ever lived or are alive now
breathe in their life put together
could fit in a space
as
big as
Lake Michigan,
Whereas an ant's total breaths in its life
would fit in a space
the
size of
your body,
And a human breathes
a space of air in its life
the
size of
the Empire State Building,
And a Blue Whale breathes a volume
so large in its life
you
could go backpacking in it
for a month
and
see no oneAntler